<p>performersmom - Nice summary! It is interesting to note that these special groups, legacy, frist gen, internations, urms, athelets, taken together make up about 50-60% of campus population. I would think institutions hope to assimilate them by the main stream unhooked population that now make up 40-50%. It seems a tall task for them. 40-50% of campus population absorb a mix of majority “minority” groups?</p>
<p>There is a separate thread going on about how much of a hook Harvard is in making it in the real life. I thought the conclusion was, if any, it is indistinguishable. If that’s true, courting athelets to nuture connections seems short-sighted. We also have to be careful about connecting alumni donations to sports. There may be a concrete connection but it could also just be the way development offices configure their fund raising efforts. Alums may have donated substantially attending school concerts if given chance. Another thing I’d like to point out is we should look at where the economy is going. Is it still fueled by the finacial sector or is the technology a bigger factor? Who has a greater influence, Warren Buffet or Steve Jobs? If it’s Steve Jobs, investing admissions in athelets is outdated.</p>
<p>It is kind of interesting that everytime I watch a Dallas cowboys football game, Jason Garrett is referred to as a genius because he attended Princeton, the assumption being he had to be really smart in order to have gotten in!</p>
<p>I have heard dean of admissions at Duke explain their admissions process a few years ago. He said they go through 5 or 6 areas of application to determine the best candidates (transcript, school rank/GPA, test scores, recommendations, honors, extracurriculars, etc.) and identify most of their candidates. At that point, they start evaluating candidates based on various needs of the school (different coaches have different quotas to make offers to, marching band needs a new drummer or a baton twirler, orchestra needs a flute player, alumni association needs some major donors kids in etc). So when they pick everyone already needed first, they fill the rest of the seats, trying to balance geographic, male/female split, International split, URM, etc. It is quite possible major sports school like Duke is already meeting most of the URM requirements through their sports quotas.</p>
<p>So looking at how schools work, education seems to be something that happens along the way and not the true role of these schools!</p>
<p>We KNOW this! Those of us who are questioning the emphasis on sports – good grief, it’s not as though we don’t get that sports are huge moneymakers, and that students wanting to go to HYP et al desire the connections that they will presumably make at such schools! Could we please not assume that we don’t get that? We just think it’s misplaced when spectator sports gets elevated so highly when it isn’t part of the mission of a university.</p>
<p>and turn all the universities to institute of technology? No. Absolutely not. Just saying the additional hook athelets get may not be to the benefit of an institution.</p>
<p>Going back to the reason the thread started, I still dont understand why are legacy admissions needed except for money, the same reason sports seem to be needed.</p>
<p>I dont get URM quotas, first gen quotas and international quotas either.</p>
<p>I have determined that my kid needs to stand out in the 18% Asian quota for the Ivies and I have resigned myself to it since the other 82% seems to be out of question.</p>
<p>PG,
I nearly always respect your opinion on these boards, but when it comes to college athletics, I don’t get you. If a college wants Div. 1 athletics, then it <em>is</em> part of their mission, whether it is overtly stated or not. That is not for you to decide. Also, people who do not appreciate the benefits of participating in elite level athletics are, in a word, ignorant, and have completing closed their minds off to the personal goals, pastime and lifestyle that is tremendously important to a huge number of people. I encourage you to take a more active and informed interest in college athletics. It may open your mind, but it might not.</p>
<p>Why not? Athletes major in subjects, too you know. Of the 8 fencers who have stated their declared majors, 3 are in Economics, and one each are in Neurology, Physics and Chemistry and Physical Biology. Do you see no value in these students?</p>
<p>The point is that the Ivies have to pick somehow from a pool of candidates that they would like to to take that is way too large.
This thread is trying to parse why these preferential methods exist, how they work, and what effect they have.
Do they reflect their economic priorities as an institution? Their social priorities? Their desire to improve society? Their desire to preserve tradition? Their desire to…?</p>
<p>For instance, was the Ivy athletic recruiting method created as a version evolved from and in contrast to the DI method: “Hey, we value academics too much to award scholarships to attract the best athletes but we do want to compete nationally, so the best compromise is to allow the coaches to pre-select them early, and allow a little less academic qualification to a given team than the rest of the student body??”</p>
<p>So< I am wondering of some of these policies evolved without a real conscious thought of what the societal or moral impact would be…</p>
<p><em>Participating in</em> and <em>observing as spectators</em> are two different things. I agree that there is benefit to participating in sports, in the sense of healthy mind in a healthy body. I certainly agree that it’s part of a college role to have appropriate physical education facilities (gyms, fields, etc.) and to encourage such participation. However, providing benefits to a limited number of students to perform athletically just so other people can watch them is different, to me. </p>
<p>Let me be clear - I don’t have a problem with any given school providing sports scholarships. My own alma mater does. That’s their prerogative. It’s not “unfair” and they can choose to disperse their scholarship money however they like. It’s just – well, it just gets to be a bit much how athletics – and particularly spectator sports – gets held up as such an important EC that it’s necessary to recruit these people upfront. There’s no such recruiting for the smart kid in science, French, history, whatever.</p>
<p>Performersmom - If Ivies originated as a group to be an athletic conference 75 or whatever number of years ago, does nt it point out the the original grouping was meant to be for athletics and they just got better as academic institutions?</p>
<p>I was reading a thread here a few months ago about college rankings. At one time, there were a lot of public schools in top 20 (Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan etc) and they are slowly being pushed out of those high ranks to make room for private schools. There was someone pointing out that the methodology was skewed towards getting Ivies as high as they can be moved and one of the schools being picked on was UPenn and how it made the top 10 over the years. It was being attributed to someone in USNWR having gone to UPenn or something like that.</p>
<p>Oh, just stop it. There is no “18% Asian quota.” Unless you can find the existence of some cabal that proclaims that there is a given Asian quota at a school, it doesn’t exist. This is not analogous to the “Jewish quotas” from nearly 100 years ago, where there were concerted efforts to limit the number of Jews. </p>
<p>And, of course, another way around it is to not be obsessed with just HYPSM …</p>
<p>They were socially and historically aligned – the formation of the specific athletic conference simply codified it. It is not as though these were 8 schools who had no links to one another who up and decided to form an athletic conference.</p>
<p>T- I honestly do not know WHEN the current rules for recruiting athletes at Ivies were created.
I was reflecting how the HS athletes see the differences in recruiting techniques, and wondered if this was behind the creation of the current rules.</p>
<p>Bay - no one, myself included, has doubted that the athletes at H (etc) aren’t strong academically. My nephew is an athlete at P. He was accepted at MIT and Williams among others before choosing P, and he’s got the goods academically, no question. We’re just challenging why sports seems to be such an important EC that it has importance above and beyond other EC’s. That’s all. (And yes, we get the moneymaking aspect. Believe me, I went to a Big 10 school, I get that, LOL.)</p>
<p>I’m not sure how it works at other schools, but I’m pretty sure the international quota at MIT has something to do with the fact that federal financial aid is limited to domestic students, and it seems possible that the same applies to other need-blind schools.</p>
<p>Also, I’m just curious why you don’t “get” preferences to URM or first generation students (I highly doubt there are specific quotas). I’m a ORM and both my parents have multiple graduate degrees, and I’m willing to accept that I got a lot of advantages in the college admissions process because of that (outside of affirmative action of course), I don’t see why this is so difficult to understand.</p>
<p>I totally “get” preferences to URM’s and first-gen. The schools want to ensure that their classes are diverse and perhaps effect some social change. A school filled with just upper middle class white people whose parents were uniformly college educated would be boring. It’s somewhat of an offset to legacy in that regard – colleges want both the families that have gone there for several generations, AND attract some “fresh blood” who might not have otherwise gone to college or who are from a background where going to college might make a huge difference in social mobility. I don’t see what’s not to get.</p>
<p>Are you sure you’re using the word quota correctly? There is a difference for “preference for …” and “quota.” Preference may be given to legacies, but there is no legacy quota. Preference may be given to URM’s or first-gen, but there is no quota. OTOH, there is, in essence, a quota on athletes if it’s of critical importance that all the slots on the football, basketball, and baseball roster be filled and the college would be dissatisfied if it let those spots go unfilled. See the difference?</p>